The Invisible Dead

And when the last Red Man shall have perished [. . .] these shores will swarm with the invisible dead of my tribe. [. . .] The White Man will never be alone.

Attributed to Chief Seattle in 1854

At the time of my birth, in April 1940, my grandfather sent my mother—his youngest daughter—a letter in which he expressed the hope that I would inherit the spirit of my famous ancestors. One of the ancestors he had in mind was my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, Hannah Emerson Dustin, born Hannah Webster Emerson on December 23, 1657, in the frontier village of Haverhill, Massachusetts. Hannah spent the first thirty-nine years of her life in relative anonymity. At age twenty she married Thomas Dustin, of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and over the next nineteen years she gave birth to eleven children, three of whom died of natural causes.

Then, on March 15, 1697, one week after her twelfth child, Martha, was born, a band of approximately twenty-five Indians (a ragtag mix of Nipmucks and Penacooks that included women and children) attacked Haverhill, looting and burning the homes of Protestant settlers. Twenty-seven people, well over one-third of the town's population, died in the attack. The dead included thirteen children. Hannah, along with her newborn infant, Martha, and her fifty-one-year-old midwife, Mary Neff, were dragged from the Dustin residence and taken captive. Thomas, who had been working in a field behind their cabin at the time of the raid, managed to shepherd eight of the couple's nine children to the safety of the nearby military garrison on Packer Hill, but he could do nothing to protect Hannah and baby Martha.

Fearing reprisal by the militia, the raiding party retreated from Haverhill with thirteen hostages in tow. Smoke from the burning town had alerted other settlers, making stealth essential to the retreat. When little Martha began to bawl with hunger, one of the braves yanked the infant from Hannah's arms, grabbed the child by her ankles, and brained her against the trunk of an apple tree. This accounts for (if it doesn't entirely justify) what Hannah did several weeks later.

The Indians and their hostages continued on foot through the woods, heading northwest toward the Merrimack River. During the twelve-mile journey that first day, thirty-nine-year-old Hannah trudged along wearing only one shoe. Everything conspired against her progress—the muddy ground, patches of swampland, pockets of deep snow—not to mention the taunting and prodding of the captors. Several other hostages, unable to keep up, were killed and scalped on the spot, their bodies left for scavenging animals, as baby Martha's had been.

The first of the French and Indian Wars was coming to a close. The Indians (who had recently been converted to Catholicism) thought of their captives as slaves and of themselves as masters. Assuming they could reach the safety of New France (now Canada), they planned to strip the hostages naked, forcing them to run a gauntlet of tomahawk-wielding men, women, and children. Even if Hannah and Mary were to survive the gauntlet (many didn't), it was understood that their master would then sell them to the highest bidder—probably a French priest who would try to convert the women to Catholicism. For Hannah's master, whose name remains unknown, there was both sport and profit to be gained by keeping the women alive, which may explain why he seems not to have been worried that traveling with these two particular women—Mary, who had lost her husband to Indians sixteen years earlier, and Hannah, who now assumed her whole family had died in the Haverhill raid—was like traveling with two rattlesnakes in a basket.

For fourteen days and nights, the Indians led their captives in a circuitous route, north along the river, closer and closer to New France. Hannah was plagued with painfully engorged breasts and, according to at least one account, still bleeding from her womb. She clung quietly to her Protestant faith. ("In my Affliction, God made His Word Comfortable to...